Sewing With My Great-Aunt Leonie Amestoy

Today you bend over organdy
In organic toil, working the small red squares
The way in your youth old men bent over earth
And still coaxed wheat and corn from the Basque soil.
You fold the cloth, then slowly roll the edges
Until rose petals bloom in your hands,
Vivified by the stitch that shirs them softly
The way the skin is shirred around your eyes.

Crooked like a mitered edge, your index finger
At rest stays poised above an unseen needle.
Indoors, surrounded by left-over silk
And wool, we rearrange the rainbow’s spectrum,
Sorting the tools of your trade–bright spools of thread,
Small silver thimbles, scissors, and the red
Pincushions studded with glass-headed pins-
As we need them, laboring in your field.

We overlap the petals; roses thrive
Under the lamplight in your wintry room.
Next you teach me the genesis¹ of frogs:
We turn the tubing and vivid cloth emerges
Out of itself like a snake sloughing its skin;
You whorl it tightly and I think this is
How your great spirit must exist in you
Compactly, coiled like a spring.

From what misfortune could you not recover
Who as a child made the pilgrimage
To Lourdes, eastward through the low green mountains
Of your own land? You say the Virgin slept
And say it lightly as if you had not been
Bitterly born to your mother’s shame
In an age when no one could tell you of
The tiny gland that kept you tiny.

Self-taught and independent by your own
Inventions, you make buttons out of thread,
Handbags with pockets hidden within pockets,
And dresses that unfold as if corollas
With minute parts inside. You instruct me in
Techniques as secret as nature’s, my fingers
Sure when yours are, atremble when yours falter
Those sharp days when you feel more and more mortal.